Kampala’s urban accessibility challenge
This study compares vehicular mobility and accessibility in Kampala with that in other African cities and considers policy recommendations to improve travel speeds.
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Couture et al. Policy Brief September 2024.pdf
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- Accessibility, traffic speed, and congestion are policy concerns in every large city worldwide. In African cities like Kampala, motor vehicle use is rising rapidly, but infrastructure has often not kept pace.
- This study compares vehicular mobility and accessibility in Kampala with that in other African cities. It identifies specific attributes of Kampala that explain its relative performance.
- Using data from 2019, this study reveals that even though Kampala’s residents tend to live within relatively short distances from a variety of venues, accessibility in Kampala is compromised by travel speeds that are much lower than the African average.
- While Kampala is highly congested, speeds are very slow, even in the absence of traffic. This means that, in relative terms, congestion plays little role in explaining why Kampala is slower than other African cities, so policies targeted exclusively at congestion may not have the highest impact.
- Key policy recommendations include upgrading the city’s road infrastructure to higher throughput roads, paying attention to the engineering challenges of the difficult geography, and upgrading traffic management to best practice in densely populated cities where many other road users compete for space with vehicles.